Services: Visitation at 4 p.m. Sunday, followed by rosary and memorial service at 7 p.m. at Alamo Funeral Home, 624 N. Alamo St. Service at 12:45 p.m. Monday at Fort Sam Houston main chapel, with burial at 2 p.m. in Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.

Guadalupe A. Martinez was kept back in elementary school because he spoke only Spanish, but later being bilingual helped him advance in the military. He lived in a time when signs declaring “No Blacks, no dogs, no Mexicans” were common, yet he became the first Mexican American principal in the North East Independent School District.

“He started out being held back but ended up being very successful,” daughter Marissa Martinez said.

Guadalupe Martinez died Sept. 20 from pancreatic cancer. He was 87.

He attended Fox Tech High School and was a year and a half from graduating when he was drafted into World War II. After the war, Martinez was denied a promotion three times because he lacked a diploma, his daughter said.

He returned to Fox Tech when he was 20, and a counselor encouraged him to go on to college. Marissa Martinez said Mexican Americans returning from the war didn't realize the GI Bill put a college education within reach.

“Up until then, none of them had any idea that this was a possibility,” she said.

As word got around, “a group of Mexican American students at Fox Tech, all friends, ended up going to St. Mary's University together after the war,” she said. “They ended up being this cohort that succeeded together.”

At St. Mary's, Martinez excelled in physics and math and enrolled in ROTC. He needed only two classes to finish his degree when he was recalled to serve in the Korean War.

The fact that he spoke Spanish enabled him to work as part of the U.N. forces attached to a Colombian unit.

When he returned from the war, he married the girl he'd met at a Mexican American social club dance five years earlier, and they settled into a military lifestyle, moving frequently.

He then worked his way up from teaching fifth-graders to being assistant principal and finally principal at West Avenue Elementary.

Marissa Martinez said she told her son, “I hoped for him that he would never have to be the first Mexican American in anything; it would mean that we've succeeded in really making equal opportunities.”